Congressional Power - Conservatives and congressional power

That the amendments would not spawn ideological successors, however, was
not apparent at the time. The congressional elections of 1972 and 1974
brought to Washington a sizable bloc of young Democrats for whom Vietnam
rather than the postwar division of Europe provided their formative
foreign policy experience. But while these Democrats shaped the
congressional mentality of the era, the mid-1970s also witnessed a
dramatic resurgence of the congressional right. Domestically, the social
and cultural divisions of the 1960s—intensified by the
antigovernment sentiments spawned by the Vietnam War and the Watergate
scandal—produced a climate conducive to the rise of conservatism.
Internationally, the conduct of the Soviet Union led a new group of
intellectuals—dubbed the neoconservatives—to demand a more
assertive U.S. foreign policy.

The sponsors of the Clark and Tunney amendments hardly expected that their
passage would open up new avenues for congressional conservatives to
influence foreign policy. But over the next ten years, the amendments
produced a host of unintended consequences. Their passage further eroded
the Cold War institutional structure of Congress, in which the body had
sacrificed potent foreign policy tools in deference to executive
authority. But if this change represented a short-term victory for
congressional liberals, subsequent developments defied expectations that
empowering Congress would pave the way for an anti-interventionist,
prohuman rights foreign policy. Instead, conservatives proved as
successful as their ideological foes in utilizing the revitalized
congressional power. Meanwhile, as Cubanbacked forces consolidated their
position in Angola, the Clark amendment came under strong attack,
beginning a process in which the amendment came to symbolize congressional
recklessness and an overly idealistic foreign policy that failed to take
into account national security needs.

Throughout much of the post–World War II period, most challenges to
the legislature's institutional orthodoxy had come from liberals
unhappy with the anticommunist foreign policies of the day. But the Tunney
amendment also provided a precedent for members of Congress, regardless of
their ideological persuasions, to use rejuvenated congressional power to
challenge executive-branch foreign policy. President Jimmy Carter's
international agenda suffered the consequences, coming under strong attack
from senators who just a few years earlier had tried to block
Tunney's initiative. In terms of immediately affecting policy, most
of these conservative initiatives failed. But, as occurred with the
liberal critics of containment a decade before, impassioned congressional
debate framed the national discussion of foreign policy in a way that
ultimately worked to the conservatives' advantage.

The newly strengthened conservatives had a more immediate impact on an
area of traditional strength: national security policy. This effort
culminated in the Senate battle against the SALT II treaty, which became
the first arms-control agreement since the early 1950s that did not clear
Congress. More important, the conservatives, led by Henry Jackson and
Barry Goldwater, succeeded in beating back the Symington-led challenge to
national security policy. By the late 1970s, in response to this
conservative pressure, liberals such as John Culver, Carl Levin, and
Patrick Leahy—the ideological heirs of the dissenters of the early
1960s—were on the defensive, attempting to show how their military
philosophy would not undermine the U.S. position in the world.
Conservatives again dominated debate over the armed services. The late
1970s and early 1980s thus joined the McCarranite era of the early 1950s
as rare periods when the congressional right set the national agenda on
foreign policy issues.

The growth of the congressional right also helped seal the fate of the
foreign policy framework laws passed in the early 1970s, the most
prominent of which was the War Powers Act of 1973. In contrast to domestic
affairs, where the increasing tendency to handle through judicial or
investigatory means disputes that previously would have been classified as
political tended to increase congressional power, the last fifteen years
of the Cold War featured the failure of the War Powers Act and other
measures designed to restore the balance between the executive and
Congress to work as their sponsors had desired. (The War Powers Act, for
instance, required the president to obtain congressional approval within
sixty days of initiating any overseas military authorization. But because
the measure gave the president the authority to decide when to start the
sixty-day clock, it has proven impossible to enforce.) In part, these
initiatives did surprisingly little to alter the fundamental balance
between the two branches because the legislation placed such a high
priority on abstract constitutional concerns. By making their offerings
such a frontal challenge to presidential authority, the sponsors of
framework legislation almost always needed to gain a two-thirds majority
in both chambers to overcome a presidential veto. But to achieve this
goal, they needed to water down their proposals, as in the War Powers Act,
when John Stennis insisted on a host of concessions that weakened the bill
in exchange for his supporting the measure.

For example, the Cooper-Church Amendment, which cut off funds for Richard
Nixon's secret incursion into Cambodia in 1970, was notable for the
willingness of its sponsors to deny that its adoption would constrain the
powers of the commander in chief, to decline to call for an instant cutoff
of funding for the incursion, and to consent to a modifying amendment
upholding the president's power to act in emergency situations to
protect the lives of U.S. forces without consulting Congress. Similar
developments frustrated congressional attempts to pass a restrictive war
powers measure, where negotiations between the House and Senate produced a
law limiting the amount of time in which the president could unilaterally
send U.S. troops overseas (ninety days) rather than limiting the
justifications for such action. The bill also allowed the president to
decide when troops were introduced into harm's way, thus triggering
the start of the time limit, while a key strengthening amendment to
include the CIA under the terms of the bill failed.

Many of the difficulties that had prevented Congress from assuming an
active role using such formal assertions of its power persisted throughout
the 1970s and 1980s. For instance, congressional investigations into the
intelligence community produced less comprehensive reforms and more
political problems for their champions than could have been anticipated
when the hearings began in 1975. For example, Frank Church found that his
chairing the Senate committee investigating CIA matters interfered with
his pursuit of the 1976 Democratic nomination for president; his House
counterpart, Otis Pike of New York, oversaw such an unruly inquiry that
his report was repudiated by the House, and he retired from Congress two
years later. And although both chambers ultimately established
intelligence oversight committees, the CIA proved effective at using a
variety of tactics to frustrate attempts at vigorous oversight,
particularly during the tenure of Director William Casey, who served from
1981 until his death in 1987.

Casey's boss, President Ronald Reagan, received an overwhelming
majority in 1980, carrying forty-four states and bringing with him a
Republican-controlled Senate. Foreign policy played a key role in his
campaign, as Reagan called for a massive arms buildup and a renewed
ideological confrontation with the Soviets. In addition, the GOP nominee
explicitly argued that Congress had grown too powerful and implicitly
suggested that congressional actions (such as the Clark amendment) had
harmed U.S. national security. Because Republicans controlled the Senate
for most of his tenure, Reagan faced less effective opposition from the
upper chamber than, arguably, any chief executive in the twentieth
century. The House offered a different story: Democrats gained twenty-six
seats in the 1982 election and had a comfortable working majority for the
rest of the 1980s. Led by the partisan House Speaker Thomas P.
"Tip" O'Neill, Jr., and Majority Leader Jim Wright,
surviving Watergate-era Democrats such as Thomas J. Downey, Michael
Barnes, and Mike Synar came into their own during Reagan's tenure.
In the process they made the House as formidable a foreign policy force as
at any point in American history.

The Reagan years yielded a mixed legacy regarding congressional power. As
had been the case essentially since their passage, the War Powers Act and
other framework legislation failed to bolster congressional power. Reagan
undertook three provocative military operations during his presidency,
sending armed forces to Lebanon and Grenada and launching air strikes
against Libya. The Libyan and Grenadan operations ended quickly, but,
particularly in the case of Grenada (where the United States sent troops
to topple a Marxist government), there seemed to be no justification for
not invoking the War Powers Act. The president called the marines sent to
Lebanon "peacekeepers," but the peace they kept favored the
Maronite Christian president in the country's long-running civil
war. Facing congressional criticism, the administration negotiated a
compromise in which it promised to seek legislative authorization if the
intervention lasted longer than eighteen months. Even in this instance,
Reagan maintained that the decision did not imply that he recognized the
constitutionality of the War Powers Act, and, indeed, Congress's
willingness to accept the plan essentially made the 1973 law a dead
letter. In the end, the troops were withdrawn before the eighteen-month
limit after the bombing of the marines stationed at the U.S. embassy in
Beirut.

While the Reagan years shattered hopes that the framework legislation
could succeed, the 1980s did show that—as Gouverneur Morris and
James Madison long before had predicted—the power of the purse
provided an important tool for Congress to influence foreign policy.
Throughout Reagan's term, members of Congress used appropriations
riders, hearings, and other unconventional methods to challenge the
administration's foreign policy, especially toward the Third World.
Few would have predicted this development in the late 1970s, when
conservative critics targeted initiatives like the Clark amendment and
other congressional expressions favoring human rights diplomacy. Theorists
such as Jeane Kirkpatrick, Reagan's first ambassador to the United
Nations, recommended distinguishing between totalitarian and authoritarian
regimes, with the former worthy of support—despite human rights
violations—because of the anticommunist nature of most totalitarian
governments. This critique grew more powerful as anti-American regimes
came to power in Iran and Nicaragua; and Reagan, after his election in
1980, adopted the Kirkpatrick philosophy as his own.

This deemphasis on idealism provided an opening for Reagan's
congressional critics. Perhaps the most effective was Michael Barnes, a
scholarly Democrat first elected in 1976 who took over as chair of the
Inter-American Relations Subcommittee following the defeats of several
more senior Democrats in the 1980 elections. Barnes, the first
Watergate-era Democrat to chair a foreign policy subcommittee, made the
most of his opportunity. Reagan's policy of aiding the contras
(anticommunist guerillas attempting to topple the Sandinista government in
Nicaragua) dominated the debate regarding 1980s inter-American policy, but
Barnes used his position to focus matters on human rights abuses by
anticommunist governments in Chile, Uruguay, and Guatemala as well.
Congressional criticism also helped cause a shift in U.S. policy toward
Chile and the Philippines, where Reagan had come to office pledging to
support the dictatorial regimes of Augusto Pinochet and Ferdinand Marcos.
Examples of the pattern included senators with such diverse ideological
viewpoints as Christopher Dodd, who led the Senate opposition to
Reagan's policy in Central America, and Richard Lugar, who helped
persuade the Reagan administration to end U.S. support for Marcos's
regime in the Philippines. Moreover, a congressional willingness to use
the appropriations power set the stage for the most important scandal of
the Reagan years, the Iran-Contra affair, when the administration covertly
funneled arms to anticommunist forces in Central America in direct
contravention of the Boland Amendment. The revelation of the affair in
late 1986 severely impaired Reagan's political standing and damaged
his historical legacy.